Poor Voter Turnout - What Would Pinker the Thinker Do?

The results of the Provincial Election and referendum on Wednesday took focus off of another critical pierce of information. On Wednesday night “The turnout was worse than a previous record low of 54.7 per cent set in 1923” , as reported by CBC. The low voter turnout also ties in with the fact that many people barely knew the details of the referendum, I know this, I volunteered at the election. I heard one woman quietly inquire at the poll about what the referendum was regarding. The lack of interest in politics from voters is a critical issue.
This issue stems from the fact that we are a time-binding society. Every second counts, therefore it seems more of a hassle to vote than a privilege. People are always rushing; this includes meals, traveling, and all daily activities. Families spend less time together, therefore less time talking about things like politics.
With this being said I am going to take the stance that society is the main culprit, but so are parents. It is well known that children absorb the most information when they are in the early stages of their lives. If parents instilled a feeling of political importance in their children at an early age this would not be a problem. This can be compared to Steven Pinker’s analysis of learning and language. In Piker’s article, Chatterboxes, he makes reference to deaf children learning sign language. Pinker makes the point that deaf children that are born to signing parents than they learn sign language “the same way that hearing infants learn spoken language”. Deaf children that may be born to parents who don’t know signing are put behind from the start. When they grow up and seek deaf communities they learn it but they “struggle with sign language as a difficult intellectual puzzle, much as a hearing adult does in foreign language classes”. Again he reiterates that the successful learning of language must be done at a critical time.
Just as parents need to teach language to their children early in life they need to introduce them to politics. When children are not exposed to something for many years than why would they suddenly develop the desire to vote, and have the aptitude to understand the way that our electoral system works. The fact of the matter is that there was ample information out there on the referendum, $6.8 million (this video is a piece of the wealth of information that was available, but not utilized - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez6IRIrW-98) of information to be exact.







Look forward to my blog next week on
Steven Pinker's study on the
difficulties of communication while under the
influence